You already know you shouldn’t sleep near your phone because doing so screws with your sleep schedule. Here’s another reason: You could text nonsense to your friends and have no memory of the conversation in the morning.

Advertisement

“Sleep texting occurs when an individual responds to or sends a text message electronically while in a sleep state,” write researchers from Villanova University in a recent study on college students’ sleep habits. The buzz of a notification can wake you up enough that you grab the phone and send a reply without being fully awake. In the study’s sample of college students, 25 percent said they had texted someone in their sleep; 72 percent of those didn’t remember it in the morning.

The authors call sleep texting “more embarrassing than dangerous,” but that all depends on who you end up texting and what you say. More concerning is the fact that text notifications are waking people up at all, interrupting their sleep. So if you must text before bed, set it to charge where you can’t reach it from your bed. Or, at the very least, put it in do-not-disturb mode.